The proliferation of the Internet has resulted in consumer demand for numerous bandwidth-intensive services. As market penetration of wideband consumer communications equipment, such as digital subscriber line technologies, cable modems and other high-bandwidth end-user equipment, increases, the demand for data-intensive services also increases. Downloading music and video files has already become commonplace for a large portion of Internet users. Moreover, the prevalence of consumer imaging technologies, such as digital cameras, digital camcorders and other digital media recorders, and personal computer (PC) video editing software applications has increased demand for data-intensive storage technologies.
Advances in data storage technologies are continually being made. Although magnetic hard drives offer gigabytes of storage space, many users consume massive amounts of storage space in relatively short periods of time. Many consumers have turned to removable data storage media due to the relatively low cost and ease of use. Compact disc (CD) recorders, or “burners,” are particularly attractive to consumers seeking low cost and high data storage capabilities. The introduction of re-writeable CD burners has further increased the convenience of compact disc media. Furthermore, the interchange capabilities provided by writeable compact disc media further enhances the market acceptance of compact disc drives and media. Digital versatile disc (DVD) recorders utilizing recordable DVD and re-writeable DVD technologies also provide an attractive format for consumers to store large multimedia files generated by, for example, camcorders, PC video, and the like, because of the advanced features of DVD such as interactivity, direct access, large storage capacity, and nominal cost.
Although writeable DVD drives are capable of writing data to DVDs that are compatible with most available DVD players for reading data therefrom, e.g., DVD drives included in a personal computer system, a barrier remains for effectively harnessing the capabilities of writeable DVDs. Presently, specialized software, commonly referred to as video mastering software, is required to format video files, such as moving pictures expert group-1 and -2 (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2) files and other computer video and audio file formats, into a form suitable for storage and playback by a DVD decoder. The DVD-video specification currently provides for 133 minutes per DVD data layer, or more, of high quality MPEG-2 encoded video with multi-channel surround sound. However, MPEG-2 standards are less stringent than DVD-video standards, and due to the abundance of variant MPEG coders, variations in MPEG-2 formatted files are common. Consequently, files may be suitably formatted for playback by an MPEG-2 decoder yet unsuitable for storage and playback by a DVD decoder.